The Digital Dungeon

I am involved in a project that has 14,000 books in it. The books tend to be relatively short, which means each one scans in about 15 minutes (on average). With two Kirtas machines, and the Atiz scanner to back up the machines by putting the items that won’t scan automatically on it, I have estimated that we could finish 128-158 books a day at only 80% efficiency (running 18 hours a day, both machines are being utilized 14 hours of the time- all week). That means, if we can make sure the machines are being used 14 hours a day, then we could get finished with our 14,000 book project in less than a year. 109 days at 128 books a day... So, four months. Originaly, we expected the project would take us 45 years. That's quite a difference. We haven't reached 128 books a day yet due to staffing issues. In the next month, those staffing issues should disapear, and we'll see if it really works in practice like it does in theory.

I have been researching high speed microfiche and microfilm scanners for the last year. There are four major companies that produce microform scanners. Mekel (a Crowley Company), Wicks and Wilson , nextScan ,and Sunrise . They each have their advantages and disadvantages. Both nextScan and Sunrise have 3-in-1 or 2-in-1 models, where you have one machine (~$100,000) that comes with one attachment, and you buy other attachments for different types of microform (Microfilm, Microfiche, and Aperture card). Each attachment costs extra. I never figured out the cost for the attachments. nextScan also has a dedicated roll film scanner , that I’ve heard good reviews from the Newspaper Digitization Project in Australia . In general, I have heard that the 3-in-1 or 2-in-1 machines are fine, but they tend to go slower than dedicated machines. They really are built for versatility and marketed toward libraries who can only afford one machine that can do all types (Paying $100,000+ for one

It turns out if you do nothing but rotate and crop with the Atiz scanner, and leave all the other stuff for Kirtas’s Bookscan editor (Converting to bi-tonal- de-skewing et cetera) , then you can batch process the book in the same time it takes to scan it.

I love the Atiz scanner for it's simplicity, good design, and utility. I love the Kirtas scanners for their speed and their "wow" factor when people see the things work. The only problem I have at the moment is taking our current Kirtas workflow (using Kirtas's software Bookscan Editor, Superbatch, and OCR manager), and finding a way to make the Atiz scanner workflow work with it. The Atiz machine came with a hefty batch editing program that does a great job of cleaning up the images and making them wonderfully presentable. The machine even came with a PDF maker, but it doesn't OCR on its own, and it doesn't give you the options that Kirtas' OCR manager do. So, I want to process the Atiz scanner finished images using Kirtas’s OCR manager. However, that seems to be more difficult than I had first expected. For the next month, I’ll be trying to figure out how to make this marriage of Atiz and Kirtas systems work. If it ends up failing, then I may have t